Seriously though, we should look back at the lives of people like Jeff Cooper, Jim Cirillo, Charles Askins, Jack Weaver, Ray Chapman, etc., etc. with admiration. We should admire them as men. We should bear in mind men are not perfect, and principles are not absolute.

Good point.

Let's add one more thing: there's a lot of fresh scientific knowledge available to us that wasn't available in the early 1970s when Jeff Cooper began formulating his ideas.

For example, he didn't have the benefit of The Invisible Gorilla or a lot of the really ground-breaking, mind-blowing studies about human awareness levels that followed it. He certainly did not know that even people who are paying attention to the world around them truly aren't -- and cannot be -- as alert as they feel they are.

A good use of the Cooper color codes today would be to explain to students that

1) They need to pay more attention to the world around them, which will reduce their already-low chance of becoming the victim of a violent crime;

4) No matter how alert they become, they will still need to learn how to effectively defend themselves when caught off guard, because true 100% awareness is literally impossible with human brain wiring.